Quiet Refusal: Food, Ritual, and Memory

Abstract

Palestinian artist Mirna Bamieh’s live art project, The Palestinian Hosting Society, invites participants to engage with traditional Palestinian foods that are on the verge of disappearing due to displacement and trauma. By orchestrating dinners, talks, and walks, Bamieh gathers fragments of these dishes and finds “ways to return them to the table, to the senses, to life”. Bamieh, in conversation with co-editor Chandra Frank, shares her most recent practice centred on grief and preservation of Palestinian food in exile, in addition to her Palestine Hosting Society work, through which disappearing Palestinian dishes are reexperienced through the “body, story and substance”.